A Podcast About Columbo

All Full of Blue Blotches

As we reach the end of the podcast’s run, we come upon “Uneasy Lies the Crown,” a rarely-mentioned late entry in the series. Steven Bochco recycles a 1970s script, in which a dentist/gambling addict tries to frame his wife for the murder of her famous actor lover. It’s actually not a bad murder scheme, and some of the performances are good, but hey, 90s Columbo, you know? Returning guest Tilt Araiza (The Sitcom Club) is here to discuss the episode, why on earth people do fanfiction and how a potential Columbo revival could possibly go wrong.

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6 comments on “All Full of Blue Blotches”

I agree with you RJ. This episode has always been one of the my favorites of the newer episodes.
Some random things that always struck me about this one:

– I would love having a waiter (at Beanery) who has a horrible cold and is coughing and sneezing all over my food.
– Not only did the villain want to frame his wife, but he must have really helped out his father-in-law’s practice. Can you picture it in YELP – “Heard one of the dentists killed a patient.”
– At the scene where the car crashed – I like how the cop nonchalantly offers Columbo a match that he happened to steal from the crime scene corpse.
– I know he was already a 70’s villain, but I think George Hamilton would have made a wonderfully slimy (but well tanned) dentist for this script.

Last things – I can’t believe there are only two podcasts left and I got happy about the thought of a Columbo action figure (as long as comes with dog and car).

I enjoyed this episode of the podcast more than I was expecting. With so few episodes left to go, could there have been a better time to fly off on such a tangent?

I have a corollary to an earlier observation I had about the early seasons of the Columbo revival having several well-established TV writers who hadn’t written for Columbo before: For at least the first two seasons, the staff was actually putting an effort into producing a good show, as opposed to “Hey, look! It’s Columbo.” When the former MacMillan & Wife producer (Jon something) died and Peter Falk became the sole executive producer (with no Philip Saltzman or Stanley Kallis), the show became more of a trip down Memory Lane.

Five wildly divergent choices for the James Read role if “Uneasy Lies the Crown” had been produced in ’73:

You could start your own Tumblr purely on pop culture things that are fictional in the Columbo universe. Jaws comes to mind from “Fade into Murder.” So something’s that fictional in a fiction piece is actually real, right? It’s a matter/anti-matter thing.